It is a familiar problem: You want to make a minor statement in an article, and you know that you have fairly good reasons to make this statement, and you also know that whether or not that statement can be verified is of very little significance to the overall point of the text you are writing. You could leave it at that. You could present the statement as a skein in a greater tapestry and leave it for some future reader to be sufficiently plagued by doubts that they will undertake that deep dive into the source material that you are trying to avoid. You could do that - but there is this nagging doubt in the back of your head, the dissatisfaction of leaving a loose end, the discomfort of knowing that you are presenting something that isn't as thoroughly checked as it could be.
I have experienced this mental trajectory on numerous occasions. It happened particularly often when I was writing my MA dissertation, and then it owed a lot to my general lack of experience as a researcher - I had not learned to leave some questions aside, I had not quite learned to prioritise, to resist the temptation of something that my inexperience and romanticism believed might open up an important point that could transmute my work into something great and memorable. Experience has taught me to deal with these temptations in a better way, and I have learned to identify more quickly which questions will not be worth the trouble. Yet even so, sometimes I am unable to resist.
The most recent example happened last night. For the past few days I have been preparing a presentation I will give at a forum for medievalists at Linnaeus University, where I work. This is an opportunity for me to test a new research topic and to get feedback on something I hope to publish in one form or another. And it is precisely because I am in this early stage of my research that it has been so very difficult to avoid falling down the sundry rabbit holes along the way.
The topic in question is the cult of Saint Thomas of Canterbury - or Thomas Becket if you prefer - in medieval Denmark. This is a topic that has received some attention by previous researchers, but usually in a peripheral way. In order to gather as much material as possible, I have been researching the liturgy of Saint Thomas as it survives in a handful of printed Danish breviaries, and this material has proved immensely fruitful.
I will not go into details about my findings on this topic here, mostly because my thoughts are still a bit too scattered and my ideas are still too poorly formulated. Suffice it to say that it made sense to compare the liturgy of Saint Thomas with that of Saint Alban, the protomartyr of England. They are both English saints, and they both appear to have had a significant cult in the bishopric of Odense, where one of the breviaries was printed. Unfortunately, the liturgy of Saint Alban has not yet been edited, at least to my knowledge, at the only way for me to properly compare the two saints was to jump straight into the rabbit hole, i.e. to transcribe the office of Saint Alban as it is transmitted in the first printed version of Breviarium Othoniense, the Odense breviary, from c.1482.
First nocturne of the office for Saint Alban
Breviarium Othoniense 1482, f.369f
(København, Kongelige Bibliotek LN 29)
It began very tentatively: A quick look at the opening of the office to scan for similarities or any noteworthy details that might save me the trouble of transcribing all of the office, but this approach ended up drawing me in all the more strongly. Because there was, in the first column, some details that strengthened and partly confirmed my suspicions, and I decided to see where this would lead me. I gave in and started transcribing. Initially, I thought that I could just do a little bit before bedtime, go to sleep, and then dabble with the transcription on and off throughout the workday. But once you have embarked on a trail like this one, it is very difficult to get out of it, and you end up sifting grains of sand to find that one grain of information that you can actually make use of. And so it continues, for a long, long time.
In the end, I kept transcribing for several hours until I finally managed to get some sleep, and I continued once I had woken up. The main result is that I now have a rough transcription of the liturgy for the feast of Saint Alban, and this is in and of itself a very useful outcome, as a transcription will make it possible for me to search the text and easily compare with other materials. As for the question that had lured me into this task, a question that was of such a kind that it could only engender new questions rather than any firm answers, I managed to find enough to justify the endeavour, but only because my suspicion was shown to have been reasonable.
It remains to be seen what I can do with the information I have gathered through the transcription of Saint Alban's office, beyond the vague confirmation that I was right to be doubtful. Perhaps I will not find much use for this information in the end. Or perhaps the only significant outcome will be that by going down that rabbit hole I have rid myself of the nagging sensation that I ought to pursue this query. In academic terms, this is not little.
Martyrdom of Saint Alban
BL MS Royal 2 B VI, f. 10v, St Alban's Psalter, 1240-60
Courtesy of British Library
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